Good day,
We are in the processes of implementing a NORTEL phone system and Stratasoft StrataDial Vc2. The question has been asked whether to go with Hard phone or soft phones. We are saying we want hard phones because of power of ethernet capability. The problem is, one of the requirements that is now coming out is one-click dialing, where the user clicks a button on the screen and it dial's out. The question I have, is this same functionality possible with a hard phone.
Thanks for your assistance.

Jeremey Garcia

Hi Jeremey

You should be able to have a softphone working with a hardphone you just need a CTI connection between the two.

This should be a pretty straight forward job for whoever is managing the implementation of your solution.

Of course I could be wrong, but I have done it before on my laptop, I even now people who have done it on a PDA.

Regards
Jason

Hey Jason,

Thanks for the reply. What I'm looking for is, is the same functionality with a soft phone, i.e. Click dial within the software and it dials the number through the softphone, available with a hardphone?

Thanks.

Yes, with many systems it is. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the combination in question to be able to answer in this case.

As Jason explained, as long as the telephone system provides CTI it's usually possible for you to control any turret using a computer. This is usually by "intervention" at the server, often through a transaction link or similar.

These days, many phone systems have a TAPI implementation which is a much easier way of handling CTI as it's supposed to be one standard for anything. However, as you'd expect, not all systems implement TAPI correctly and even with this you get unexpected results.

Just one thing that interests me:
We are saying we want hard phones because of power of ethernet capability

PoE is one way of powering an IP phone, but I can't see why this would influence your decision over hard/soft?